State auditor says UC Santa Cruz altered UCOP survey responses

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UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal and University of California President Janet Napolitano meet with students in the MESA program at Hartnell College in Salinas on April 21, 2016. (Vern Fisher — Monterey Herald file)

SANTA CRUZ – UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal knowingly altered his campus’s response to a state auditor’s survey under the direction of UC President Janet Napolitano’s staff, according to state auditor Elaine Howle.

Howle revealed the “intentional” interference in the April 25 investigative report, “The University of California Office of the President: It Failed to Disclose Tens of Millions in Surplus Funds, and Its Budget Practices Are Misleading.”

On pages 85-87, the report describes how auditors sent two surveys to 10 campuses in October 2016, each designed “to assess the types and quality of services” the Office of the President provides to the campuses.

Howle explicitly asked each campus not to share its survey results externally; however, in February she learned the Office of the President had asked the campuses to send their survey responses to it for review before submitting them to the auditors.

In addition, the deputy chief of staff of the Office of the President organized a conference call with all campuses to discuss the survey and screened the surveys before the campuses submitted, according to Howle.

During this stage of the audit, four of those campuses – UC Santa Cruz, UC Riverside, UC Irvine and UC San Diego – changed survey responses at the request of the Office of the President to cast Napolitano and her office in a more positive light.

“Correspondence between the Office of the President and the campuses shows that the Office of the President inappropriately reviewed campuses’ survey responses, which resulted in campuses making changes to those responses prior to submitting them to us – campus statements that were critical of the Office of the President had been removed or substantially revised, and negative ratings had been changed to be more positive,” said Howle.

Table 15 of the report includes an example from the UC Santa Cruz survey. The original, 184-word survey response described an Office of the President initiative as initially “very poorly and inefficiently run.” The revised, 72-word version eliminates all negative reference. Instead, it calls the services and leadership of the Office of the President “crucial” to the success of the UC system and a “true public policy benefit.”

In addition, a Nov. 23 email from Blumenthal to his staff obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle, reveals that Blumenthal suggested his staff remove a paragraph from the survey that the Office of the President found objectionable.

“The feedback I received from (the president’s office) is that they are happy with the entire submittal except for the long paragraph at the bottom of page 39,” Blumenthal wrote. “I suggest you remove the paragraph and submit it.”

UC Santa Cruz officials deferred all questions to the Office of the President.

“The UC Board of Regents are undertaking a review of the audit. The campus will refrain from comment until this review is completed,” said UC Santa Cruz Director of News and Media Relations Scott Hernandez-Jason.

A request for comment from the Office of the President was not immediately returned.

On Thursday, University of California regents vigorously defended Napolitano during their first public in-person meeting following the April 25 report.

Regent Norman Pattiz said he was “still delighted” with Napolitano’s leadership during the meeting Thursday morning at a conference room on UC San Francisco’s Mission Bay campus. His comments echoed those of other regents, who spent a good portion of their time expressing frustration about what one called “salacious” media coverage of the audit.

But some UC students at the meeting thought the regents were blaming the messenger. “I’d rather they focus on their own accountability,” said Danielle Bermudez, a graduate student at UC Merced.

Reporter Emily Deruy of the Bay Area News Group contributed to this report.

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